i3en.xlarge

Analysis

The i3en.xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the i3en series with 4 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it memory-heavy at 8 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the i3.xlarge on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) costs $0.3120/hour, 31% less ($102 a month).

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $196 a month per instance: $0.4520/hour against $0.7200/hour, a 59% spread.

Looking beyond its own line, 38 of 45 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the r6g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2016/hour.

On demand it costs $0.4520/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $330 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for storage optimized types at the 58th percentile per vCPU ($0.1130 per vCPU-hour) and the 47th percentile per GiB ($0.0141 per GiB-hour).

It has local instance storage (1 x 2500 GB NVMe SSD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 25 Gigabit.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.3080/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $0.1970/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 41% to the bill at $0.6360/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.